Volcanic Eruption That Changed World Marks 200th Anniversary
Two hundred years ago on April 10, the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted, obliterating an entire tribe of people, cooling the Earth by several degrees, and causing famines and disease outbreaks around the world.
It remains the largest eruption on historical record: larger than the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and roughly 20 times bigger than Mount Vesuvius, which wiped the Italian town of Pompeii off the map. If such a cataclysmic event happened now, the results would be even messier, experts say.
"The consensus is that it would be absolutely devastating," says Gillen D'Arcy Wood, an environmental historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our transportation, food, and humanitarian infrastructure are much better now than they were in the early 1800s, he says. "But we are also a planet of seven billion with a highly complicated global food and trade network."
Think of the disruptions to worldwide air travel when Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in 2010, Wood says. That was a small eruption compared to Tambora.
Estimates of the death toll after the Tambora eruption range from 71,000 to 121,000. But the world is much more densely populated today, says Janine Krippner, a volcanologist and doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. If something like Tambora blew its top now, a far greater number of lives would be in danger, she says.
Complete story at - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150410-tambora-volcano-eruption-climate-change-famine-earth-science/
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